pictures

Fhotoroom is a popular photo editing app for your Windows Phone that not only allows you to edit your images but also has a social networking aspect to it. Editing includes basic tools such as cropping, exposure edits, and rotating the image as well as filters and frames. Edited images can be saved to your SkyDrive account, Windows Phone as well as shared on the Fhotoroom Photo Sharing Network (free registration required). The network will let you show off your images with other Fhotoroom users, get and give feedback and message other members.

Fhotoroom was recently updated to version 2.0 which brings a major overhaul to the photography app. The update not only brings new features to the editor, social network and in-house camera but also brings a new layout and user interface to the app. You also have the routine bug fixes and performance tweaks.

MonsterCam is a photography app for your Windows Phone that will allow you to put an interesting twist on your pictures. Twist, whirl, spins, and other distortions that is.

Effects can be applied to newly captured images or photos you have tucked away in your Pictures Hub. MonsterCam allows you to apply a number of effects to your images that gives them a carnival mirror type appearance. You can give you girlfriend a huge nose, bug eyes, or squinch her face up. Just be careful and make sure she has a sense of humor before you apply MonsterCam to her portraits.

Memento is a photography app for your Windows Phone that lets you apply one of nine film effects to your photographs. Memento has a simple, straight forward interface, some cool filters but does have room for improvement.

The main menu offers options to take a picture to edit, load a picture to edit, view your gallery (images already tweaked) and tap into Memento's settings. Settings are limited to turning on/off the app's Facebook integration.

If you opt to take a picture, the app will launch your Windows Phone camera app and return once you accept the new image. If you choose to apply the effects to an existing photo, just pick the image out from your Pictures Hub and you're in business.

“The layout is clean. The editing tools are enough to do a decent job at cleaning up your photos or give them an artistic feel. And as someone who has processed what feels like a bazillion photos over the years, the editing history tile is a very nice touch. It's easy to forget if you've adjusted contrast or what filter was applied and the history tile leaves no room for doubt.”

The photo editing app always stood out amongst the herd. The app fetched for $1.49 with a free trial but it is now marked as free in the Marketplace with the price drop just occurring. In addition, the app hit version 2.0 at the end of July making this a double win if you had not already purchased it...

Nokia's Camera Extras for the Lumia Windows Phones has been available in the US for a while now. While the initial release was in the U.S., Indian and Chines markets, we knew it was only a matter of time before other markets would get the camera app. Such is the case now with Australia, the United Kingdom and Italy (and probably other markets) where Windows Phone shutterbugs in these Countries can enjoy the extra camera settings.

Pictures Lab is a very nice photo editing app for your Windows Phone. The app offers a wide selection of editing tools that includes filters, borders, exposure adjustments and more. The app is in the top five photography apps on the Marketplace and has recently had it's price cropped. The original $1.99 price tag on Pictures Lab is dropped to $.99 making the app a steal of a deal.

Pictures Lab has Facebook and Twitter integration to make social sharing of your photos easier. Settings allow you to set the image quality on images you share and save. Plus you can add an artist name (e.g. copyright) to the image's EXIF file. plus you can set the image quality in the app's settings.

If you're not sure about Pictures Hub, there is a free trial version available to let you try before you buy. The full version is running $.99 and you can find Pictures Labhere at the Windows Phone Marketplace.

A few weeks ago we reported on Aviary releasing their SDK for Windows Phone, allowing developers with little effort to plug in the company’s photo editing suite into any application out there. Rowi was one of the first to do this, allowing its users to quickly do sophisticated photo edits without ever leaving the popular Twitter app.

Today, Aviary has released Photo Genius, a standalone version of those tools for all Windows Phone users. The app is a “demonstration” one meaning it’s meant to show off what Aviary can do but for you all that means is you get an awesome, full featured photo editing program for your phone.

The app behaves like the “Auto Fix” feature built into Windows Phone. It analyzes a selected photo and then recommends a sweeping set of changes which you can enable with a quick “checkmark”. You can then compare the before and after images with a simple toggle, allowing you to see if you like the modifications.

If you don’t like the alterations or want to do more, you can hit the “Edit” button and load up Aviary’s full set of photo manipulation tools. Such tools include controls for brightness, contrast, sharpness, cropping, rotation, red-eye fix, filters, stickers and more—it really has it all.

Once you’re done you can just hit the “Save” icon and that’s it and you have your fully edited photo.

Overall, Aviary Photo Genius is a great little app. It’s “smart” and has a ton of features on board, allowing you to really control every aspect of how your photo looks. It is a big sluggish on loading photos initially (in the gallery) but once you’re up, it works just like any other app.

The main menu of Photo Light has five tiles that give you options to load an existing image from your Pictures Hub, launch your camera to capture a new image to edit, display the EXIF file information on images, access the app's settings and view the About screen.

Just a quick note about the EXIF information is that not only will Photo Light display the data contained in the image's EXIF file but it will also map it out if GPS data is present. For those not familiar, the EXIF file is short for Exchangeable Image File that is a metadata file that contains all the information your camera collects as it takes a picture. The amount of information varies from camera to camera but in general, the EXIF will contain camera settings, image size, date/time taken, and more.

The app downloads as a separate program but it does integrate into the camera module meaning you can just quickly load the whole thing by hitting your dedicated camera button. Overall, the features are pretty good and we think many of you will enjoy the new additions. Nokia may be late to the game but they often get it right in the end.

Next up is Play To, Nokia's DLNA app which has finally made it to their Collection. Allowing you to "stream" your Music, Photos and Videos to any DLNA capable device e.g. your TV, the app is a great way to show off your photos to friends and family.

The system auto searches for any DLNA devices over WiFi such as BluRay Players, PCs and more. We don't have one in house so can't test it, we'll leave that to you for now.

Note: For both apps it says you may need the latest update for your phone in order to work--that would be Windows Phone "Tango" (8773) for some of you or Nokia's latest firmware for others. Things like DLNA require some "ground work" done by Nokia in their firmware to be installed so if you can't install these apps or you don't get all of their features, you may have to wait till you get a phone update first.

If not available in your Market (It appears to be US, China and Inida right now) stay tuned as Nokia is rolling these throughout July.

Pick up Camera Extras here and Play To here in the Nokia Collection. Thanks, CaliforniaDrew, for the heads up

With the recent release of Microsoft's Photosynth to the Windows Phone Marketplace, there's really no excuse for anyone not to capture decent panoramic images. Photosynth joins a nice collection of in-house panorama apps and a decent third party app. But how do these panorama tools measure up against one another?

We took our handy-dandy tripod out to see if one shined brighter than the other. There's really not a bad panorama app in the lot but a few lined up a little better than others.

Simply put, Photosynth for Windows Phone is a game changer. Photosynth is a panorama app that mocks at large group shots, laughs when there isn't enough room to back up, and smiles when a picturesque landscape is in front of the camera. The camera app opens up a new world of photography for your Windows Phone and does so rather nicely.

Unlike other panorama apps for your Windows Phone that sticks to either a vertical or horizontal plane, Photosynth can do both and handle 360 degrees of capture. No longer are you concerned if you can't back up enough to capture tall buildings in a landscape shot. No longer are you worried that you won't have enough room for a group shot.

Throw in an online interface, the ability to share images through Facebook and Twitter, share your images through BING, embed images and upload/store/share images at Photosynth.net this little photography app is very impressive.

The other day we shared a list of the best photography apps for your Windows Phone. We knew that there were other worthy photo apps out there and one such app that was mentioned prominently in the comments was Fantasia Painter.

On the one hand the Fantasia Painter is a photo editing app. On the other hand Fantasia Painter is a creative suite to give your photos a serious splash of color. On top of all that, if painting is more your cup of tea Fantasia Painter can handle that as well.

It's really hard to tell how many editing tools Fantasia Painter has (the Marketplace description says 45+ but that feels a little low) but it ranks amongst the top photography Windows Phone apps on the amount of control you have over editing your pictures. Fantasia Painter is an impressive photography app for your Windows Phone and it can be a little intimidating. Once you get the hang of the controls and all the editing possibilities, Fantasia Painter can really make your photos shine.

The Samsung SGH-i667 aka the 'Mandel' is one of the last Windows Phone that we have very little information about. It passed BT certification in January and then cleared the FCC in March but since it did not co-launch with the HTC Titan II and the Nokia Lumia 900, it is presumed that the Samsung LTE phone was canceled.

Now, two images have leaked out of the device, the first one you see above is the back of the phone and it shows a svelte, glossy white smooth rounded back.

The second image is a screen cap of the device connected up to Zune Desktop, showing the device name. The AT&T logo is prominent on the device and featured in that image which is pulled from Microsoft's servers.

The device also appears to be sporting only 8GB of storage (with 5.61 available) which tells us that this was probably not a high-end, flagship phone for AT&T but an offshoot of the Focus Flash, which also goes by the name i667.

Other than that we just don't have any more information. The images come by way of the site WPXAP and no other details were given.

Now that you have some insight on how your Windows Phone camera works, these apps will help you edit and add a creative touch to your photographs. Some of these apps will even have an in-house camera function to keep everything under one roof.

As with all our "best of" lists, this list contains the apps that stand out in our opinions. If we've missed an app that you think should be included, please sound off in the comments.

We last wrote about Boxfiles for Dropbox back in December. The app comes into two flavors (a free version and a paid one) and has undergone numerous updates since then.

The latest just hit the Marketplace and it brings a really neat feature that many of you may enjoy: automatic camera uploads to your Dropbox account.

This is very useful and desirable because although Windows Phone can do this for Skydrive, it re-scales images automatically leaving you with a "just good enough for the web" sized memory. That's a problem though if, like us, you want to back up your photos to "the cloud" but at their full resolution. Even more so if you have a device like the Titan II with a 16MP camera and photos averaging around 2MB in size.

Version 3.6 of Boxfiles brings this feature but we should point out that it's not entirely 100% automatic meaning you snap a shot and off it goes. Instead you do need to open the app for a few seconds as it will scan your camera directory on the phone and upload and new pics to your Dropbox account.

But once the queuing takes place (usually just a few seconds) you can close the app as it will upload the photos in the background, so you don't need to babysit the app. It's basically a one-touch app to upload all your latest camera shots.

You can also choose a specific directory (or create a new one) to upload the photos too and pick if you want WiFi-only or both WiFi/Cellular data usage. Our favorite part though is how it allows you to browse your photos via thumbnails in addition to just the obscure files-names. Finally, Boxfiles also integrates with your Skydrive account giving you the choice to manage those files from within the app. A nice bonus.

So far only the paid version has been bumped with this feature though we imagine the free one will get it at some point too. What can we say? Of all the Dropbox apps on the Marketplace, we happen to like this one the most and this new auto-upload features makes backing up and sharing our pics easier.

WPCentral's Guide to the Windows Phone Pictures Hub

With the release of the Nokia Lumia series (710, 800, 900) and the HTC Titan II Windows Phones, we are seeing new Windows Phone users picking up the new phones. We've touched on must have games and must have apps for your Windows Phone. We've also touch on some of the best free apps for your Windows Phones. Now we'll turn our attention more in-house to take a look at the various Hubs on your Windows Phone. First up, the Pictures Hub.

The Pictures Hub on your Windows Phone is the repository for your photographic albums, a central hub where you can share your photos and where you can back images up to your Skydrive account. The Pictures Hub is where you go to manage the moments you capture on video and photos. After the break we have a walk-through of the Pictures Hub for those new to Windows Phone and a refresher for those more familiar with things.